


Blue Blue Jeans Under the Crimson Blush

by Cryon



Category: Fate/Grand Order, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: (They are extremely important.), Fluff, Humor, Multi, Slice of Life, blue jeans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-09-25 21:43:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17129267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cryon/pseuds/Cryon
Summary: For countless aeons, she has ruled over the lands where the dead sleep their final rest.Mistress of power unfathomable, accustomed to naught but her duty and solitude eternal.But now, the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Ereshkigal has to face a challenge that may yet prove too much for her: learning how to become the perfect housewife.





	1. Unlimited Blame Works (Sometimes)

**Author's Note:**

> An idea born, like one too many, from a mere whim. One likely doomed to the irregular schedule you should have come to expect from yours truly by now.  
> To all of you readers who will spend a few minutes on this and any other pieces that may follow this series: thank you, and please enjoy the ride. May the silliness in these paragraphs find a snug fit within your sensibilities, like a pair of buttocks would in any respectable pair of tightly-fitting blue jeans.

It was only when he gazed at the blighted scenery in front of him, that the man simply known as “Emiya” truly understood the meaning of _tragedy_.

He felt his fingers move spontaneously to the bridge of his nose like survivors fleeing a disaster. The gentle massage was an exercise in futility: when he released the grip, his unobstructed vision stayed the same - a dismaying canvas of despair, not painted so much as splattered all over his eyes. It was like a pinpoint strike against the very concept of hope. Proof that gods existed, and they were capable of spite.

Well, if it was proof of concrete divinity, then Emiya wouldn’t have had to look over his shoulder. There, sitting on the cracked tiles of a floor caked with ashes of mysterious origin, was the deity responsible for putting the former Counter Guardian’s faith to the test with the single greatest calamity he’d ever faced.

The sumerian goddess Ereshkigal, the Terrible Earth Mother who ruled over the Netherworld, failed to meet the sharpness of the glare being shot at her. Her head, crowned with the ghastly symbol of her otherworldly royalty, bowed sheepishly, bringing her gaze down to her lap. Her legs were covered by the thick fabric of a pair of tight-fitting blue jeans.

For reasons that language failed to verbalize, Emiya felt that last detail alone could have destabilized his conception of the world almost more effectively than the wreck in front of him. _Almost_. He shook his head and jerked it away in the same motion, eyelids low on his disappointed expression. He was frankly unsure of where to look to keep his already faltering sanity from escaping.

“I take back my earlier statement. I wasn’t ready for this. I don’t think I’ll ever be ready for this. If a self of mine from a different timeline came here to warn me about it… make no mistake - I _still_ wouldn’t be prepared to deal with whatever calamity you’ve wrought here.”

A soft murmur tickled his ear, prompting the Servant to turn around in time to catch the deity looking away with an innocent air of absolutely obvious guilt.

“Care to repeat that, Miss Goddess?”

“N-nothing.” stammered she with immediately puckering lips. She then furtively shot a glance aside, to confirm that _yes_ , her guest was still staring daggers at her in a manner that was entirely liable to become literal at any given moment. It was an effective, if questionable incentive to start speaking.

“I mean. Iiit’s not… that bad?”

“It is.” Emiya wasted about 0.1 seconds coming up with a retort. And, dear god(dess), there was more.

“It is _that_ bad. Mh. No, that’s not it. Let me correct myself: it’s worse. ‘Bad’ would imply that… whatever this is, it has yet to touch the ceiling of whatever metric is used to measure the misfortunes wrought by causality upon this world. This… it has broken through altogether.”

He was right, but he was being _annoyingly_ right, and that ignited the paltry reserves of Ereshkigal’s pride like a child playing with a lighter next to a vat full of gasoline.

“Now you’re just exaggerating!”

“Am I? Am I?!”

His index thrust vehemently upwards, to the scorched marks surrounding a sizeable hole where once stood a brave little portion of the ceiling. He had quite effectively become the mother screaming ‘NO!’ while she took the lighter away from her child’s hand, leaving Ereshkigal’s pool of flammable pride to merely simmer by itself. Kind of like her blood was doing all over her face.

“Lie to me, Miss Goddess. Toss the truth in a fire of falsehoods and give me the answer I want, not the one I need and have already figured out by myself. How did this happen.”

That thing was too blunt to be called a question. Too blunt, too desperate, too heavy and too rough. It was more like a large chunk of stone dropped atop Ereshkigal’s knees, listing all the crimes she had committed, and a couple she had yet, but was very likely to in the near future.

The very embodiment of death itself felt like she was about to die, cause of demise: embarrassment overdose. _Wrong_ couldn’t begin to describe her predicament. The Class Triangle had betrayed her, leaving her alone with the compelling demand for an undesired answer. A death goddess caught in a dead end - enough irony to kill somebody.

Ereshkigal inspired deeply, her knuckles whitened by the tightness of her grip on the blue jeans covering her knees.

“I tried cook–”

##  **“I’M IN DESPAIR! THE GODDESS’ LIES HAVE LEFT ME IN DESPAIR! IT WAS HELL I WALKED INTO! _KIRITSUGUUU!!!_ ”**

Here laid the Heroic Spirit Emiya, kneeling on the floor in front a most vicious deity, his fist’s fall that of a hammer of justice sentencing without mercy.

“I called you here for help, not because I was in the mood for a mouthful of insolence!” all but bawled Ereshkigal, more shame than goddess, clad in more blue jeans than was acceptable by any sensible standard.

“Don’t talk to me about insolence.” The accusatory finger made its comeback, changing targets. It was now stabbing the distance separating Emiya from his host, pointing in the general direction of those hypnotic blue jeans of hers. “Apologize! Apologize to the generations of chefs you besmirched with your unholy terrorism! Do you dine on atom bombs back in the hell you came from?”

Otherwordly arms crossed indignantly in front of a heaving, sweater-clad bosom. Not that the sweater was really worth a mention, unlike the blue jeans.

“Quiche. I wanted to surprise my husband.”

“Quiche.” echoed faintly Emiya’s voice, a whisper in the darkness of his own broken heart. Between this and the palpable feeling of impending hair loss by stress, he wondered if the wife back home was going to mind him going Alter on her out of the blue. She seemed to mind _anything_ as long as it gave her a reason to nag, tease or perform an unsufferable combination of the two.

And even _that_ would have been preferable to finding himself here.

“Unaware of loss… nor aware of gain… withstood pain to create many failures, waiting for one’s arrival… she has no regrets. This is the only path. Her whole life was…”

“Are you done muttering to yourself?” The deity was leaning forward, patting the murmuring pile of despondence that was Emiya on his trembling head. “I need you to fix this before he comes back.”

The Archer leveraged his paltry D-ranked Strength for all its worth to straighten his back, something he wished he could do just as easily for his spirit. He sat martially in front of the goddess impatiently waiting for his answer, took in a deep breath. He did not flip the switches regulating his inner world so much as go to town with the entire array and hope for the best. What he needed was not reason, but the right amount of foolishness to keep himself from falling back into old habits and high leg it away from the premises.

“How much time.” he asked solemnly, his eyes squeezed shut in a last ditch attempt to convince himself reality would be waiting in a more tolerable form once he’d open them again.

Ereshkigal took out the flat rectangle of a smartphone from one of her blue jeans’ pocket, fiddled with its cracked screen for about a dozen seconds, and promptly gave up.

“About… twooo hours?”

The oxygen flowed plentiful through Emiya’s nostrils. He let silence grow between them out of an obligation to his wavering psyche more than to any form of suspense. Then, an eternity-like moment later he arose, standing tall, a beacon of hope in a land of despair. The harbinger of Ereshkigal’s smile, and the eventual, imminent butcher of the same.

_“I bid you good luck.”_

“Oh no, you won’t!”

Eldritch alloy twisted into existence and snapped shut like maws of a hungering beast over an already protesting Emiya, his struggle against the bars of the cage which had formed around him an exercise in futility.

“Let me out, you bringer of calamities! I don’t have to deal with this!“

“I wouldn’t resort to these kinds of methods if you didn’t give me a reason to.”

Ereshkigal stood up with all the grace of a woman dusting off her blue jeans-clad buttocks while keeping hostage the guest who was supposed to save her from giving her husband a really, really awkward explanation.

“I gave up chasing hopeless dreams a long time ago. You should do the same and let me out while you’re at it, you fool of a goddess!”

“The time you’re wasting with your protests would be better spent fixing my kitchen. And the better portion of the living room. And most of the second story’s bedroom’s floor. Look, I know my sister. You should be used to doing menial jobs like this, no?“

“First of all, there is nothing menial about rebuilding a good chunk of your home. And that sister of yours may be a complete illiterate when it comes to technology, but at least she has yet to turn our microwave into a Broken Phantasm.”

 _Click_.

“What was that. Why are you smiling? What did you _do_ , goddess?!”

It was nobody’s fault but his own - and Ereshkigal’s, admittedly - that Emiya kept asking questions with answers he was destined to loathe. In this particular case, the answer hovering in front of his bewildered eyes, filtered through bars of a prison infinitely more fragile than the one he felt enveloping his spirit, was that of a vocal recorder, the godly hand holding it, and Ereshkigal’s unabashed smirk.

“You didn’t.”

“Care to discover if that’s the case? Or would you rather I fetched the toolbox and watched you get started on the fridge?”

The man who once styled himself a savior of mankind, scourge of evil and sweeper of calamities stared behind him. There, beyond bars of Netherworld-cast iron, resided his ultimate trial, the Bad End to end all Bad Ends.

He turned around again, a resigned flavor of determination coloring his hardened visage.

“Pass me the phone. We’re going to resort to some drastic measures if we’re to do this without resorting to a Grail.”

A fingersnap later, Ereshkigal was handling her damaged phone to her guest before he could enjoy his newfound freedom or perform a last-ditch attempt at fleeing from the premises.

“Who are you calling? I’d rather not spread the word about this, you know.”

“Don’t worry. The people I’m calling are the last anyone would want to enjoy exchanging gossip with.”

He dialed the number with hesitation slowing his typing speed. Regret had already taken root on his face, and it was unlikely to leave anytime soon.

Emiya faced the goddess Ereshkigal, and especially her deep blue jeans with dire, bitter irritation.

“I’m calling that Annoyingly Loud Inventor Trio.”

It is said that that day, the Archer’s headache grew three sizes bigger.


	2. Merry Brood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter titles are HARD.

Speaking of, reproduction? Pretty big fucking deal, and please pardon the horrid combination of tasteless language and eyeroll-worthy wordplay. You could say, heeeh, what about it? Animals got it down to a T even if the highest display of their intellect amounts to distinguishing whether the piss-stained spot marks their turf or another of their ilk’s. Plants, they don’t even need that much brainpower, hell, they don’t need a brain at _all_ , just a little hand from the occasional bee passing by and BAM, get that stamen-and-pistil action going, baby. Reproduction’s a non issue.

If it wasn’t for the fact that it can, may and most dauntingly _will_ become an issue when you least expect it to. Oh, stay your pontificating indexes from reaching for the stars, I’m not wasting both of our times by bringing up the lowest common denominator among case scenarios. I’m taking the subtle path here, the next natural step on the troublesome ladder, which one is wont to encounter once said obvios hurdle has already been successfully dealt with.

So, let’s say that you, rather than the generic, non-descript reader I assume to have been led thus far by the inky hand of my words, were to be someone else, an _else_ whose existence skirts that of a some **thing**. Let’s say you were a goddess of the deathly underworld from Mesopotamian mythos.

Woah, what! That sure took a strange turn all of a sudden, didn’t it?! And you’re right in thinking that, just like I am in assuming that these are the words which erupted in your brain when I suddenly thrust you in the role and tight-fitting blue jeans of one Ereshkigal, surname kept under wraps to preserve a sliver of her privacy from prying eyes. But, the fact of the matter is that no other person, deity or metaphysically messed up combination of those two could have better embodied the wisdom hinted at by the above paragraphs than her. It was her, after all, that on a particular day of a particular month, in a year and time period whose precision eludes our need for concern, who opened the door to her sizeable household to find not one, but two figures standing in front of her, one smiling far more widely than the other meekly hiding her.

Now, because the insufficiency of pronouns and monikers for undisclosed figures would turn the oily fluidity of this narration thicker than cold marmalade, let us say here and now that the two visitors eagerly greeted by Ereshkigal were none other than the goddess Parvati and the most notorious among the Gorgons, or an easily pocketable iteration of her person anyway - a most Lily Medusa, in other words. Biologically speaking, the two of them were about as related as Ereshkigal was to the childish figure who enthusiastically ran to greet the feline ear-hooded one, clad in the horrendous festiveness of a Christmas sweater the likes of which would have made even the most tasteless among grandmas balk, but which also provided an entirely necessary layer of coverage upon her petite body, which nobody in their right mind would have left out in the cold, inappropriate open. _Right?_ And right, too, did these two pairs feel in their particular manner to give their mutual bonds an importance that mere blood alone couldn’t have established.

It was perfectly fine, therefore, for the Mesopotamian goddess of death to sit down on a sofa bought from a Swedish chain vendor and engage in idle chatter with her diametric Hindu opposite like any pair of actual sisters would have done over a cup of juice made from tropical juice, not to further emphasize the pluriculturalism of the scene described, but because Ereshkigal didn’t feel too confident about her brewing skills after the incident involving the coffee machine, an inconvenient lack of filters, and the discovery that no, magical cages concocted by life-stealing forces do _not_ make for a suitable substitute.

It was fine, too, for Ereshkigal to eventually go check on the children lying on their cookie-filled tummies (the cookies, of course, were the storebought kind, seeing as Ereshkigal’s last involvement with an oven had produced less than desirable results) and poring over a volume with a focus that belied their apparent and mental ages. Inevitably, the caretaker of ancient afterlife-bar-apprentice housewife would peek over their whispering heads to take a curious gander at the volume.

And it would be then that Ereshkigal pale-facedly stumbled her platter-sized eyes upon the decidedly _not_ fine content of said volume - a perfectly pristine copy of _Stay The Night! Sex Ed 101_ , her jaw dropping at the speed of a speechless Oh My Me before cautiously, tentatively intruding upon the hushed meeting with a tentative question.

“Oh, this? Nursery Rhyme let Medusa borrow it!” enthusiastically answered a Jeanne most Santa Lily Alter, providing a trampoline to jumpstart the quieter mumbling of her visiting friend.

“She said that this book says how babies are born. But it uses a lot of weird words and it’s hard to understand…”

“Wait, Medy, I know! Let’s just ask mom!”

By that point, it would be too late. The fate of a goddess had been sealed the moment she’d set foot in a realm that should have forever been denied to her, a realm whose entrance was watched over by the two guardians whom, now, were to direct upon her the riddle that all parents, surrogate or otherwise, eventually must face, and they did so with the inescapable trappings of an immature innocence.

“Mom, you know, right? How do you make a baby?”

Now, understand that humans have it easy. Your average Homo Sapiens Sapiens doesn’t have an eternity and a half of groundskeeping spent in a realm where death and decay are the norm and the main locally feature flavor, usually. That kind of gives them an edge over the embodiment of a metaphysical entity that very much _does_ have that sort of background. It was therefore entirely understandable that Ereshkigal’s first reaction upon being hit by the megaton bomb emitted by her child’s shiny-eyed, smiling face was to dip her gaze into her glass, pour down its remaining contents, and deeply regret the fact that she hadn’t previously spiked it with something, _anything_ strong enough to help her deal with this.

Alright, let’s analyze the options available: the first and most obvious would have been a combination of dismissal, silence and utter cowardice. Enticing, if not for a cost too great to bear - that of not one, but _two_ expressions of childish disappointment and a whole baggage of future issues born of curiosity poisoned by the venom of dangerous ignorance. So scratch, dump and send into the pit that.

Next option: brutally blunt honesty, immediately vetoed by the council of Tsun with unanymous approval by the Dere party and significant support by the Common Sense crowd. Preserving the delicate balance between pristine innocence and important life knowledge deserved a little more finesse than dropping a handful squelchy, moist details all over a pair of children’s unprepared minds.

Very well then. If a brutal Buster-flavored onslaught nor an exceedingly hasty Quick barrage would have done the trick, then there was nothing else to it than resorting to the ace in her sleeve, the last resort in her heavily skewed deck: a bout of roundabout Artsy stalling.

It was fine. _She_ would be fine. Ereshkigal swallowed hard, saliva with a vaguely pineappleish flavor to it wetting her dry throat, and put on her best _Mooou!_ face. Something like this:

With an air of frankly overblown tension neatly represented by an adequately spine-chilling theme. The kind you hear in bombastic and usually deceitful trailers.

“Babies… you see…”

Oh, those two wide-eyed faces leaning in so close with their hunger for the most forbidden of wisdoms were not helping at all! Ereshkigal took a tentative step back, the trembling flesh of her thighs suffocated by denim fabric constraining them tighter than ever.

“Yes, well! So, to make a baby you need a man… and a woman.”

The chorus of _mhmh’s_ , if nothing else, was encouraging.

“A-and so, what the man does is… he puts his…”

The moment of truth and thinly veiled lies, the culmination of wisdom vastly unsuited for the task at hand, compelled by a monster and a zany assemblage of way too many adjectival qualifiers clinging on her every word, brought Ereshkigal’s fervent thoughts to their astoundingly baffling cusp. Something clicked inside her head. A switch that shouldn’t have been flipped, controlling the dam preserving the last shreds of her dignity from being drowned in fathomless idiocy.

“He puts his **mana** into the woman, and that mana turns her tummy into a **summoning vessel**.”

“Wow! So humans are born just like Servants, mom?”

“I-it’s not quite the same.” The first bead of sweat shone on Ereshkigal’s cheek, heralding the arrival of its companions.

“Can a girl put her mana in another girl’s summoning tummy?”

The Mesopotamian goddess of death struggled to meet a Medusa stuck in a mind and body of an age that struggled to reach the double digits. Hesitation, and the vivid mental image of a legendary incubus smirking in her general direction, kept her quivering lip silent for a significant moment. Somewhere else in a realm beyond distance and common human decency, the same incubus sneezed, knocking a hot cup of pumpkin spice latte all over his keyboard in the middle of a singing stream.

“N-no, they can’t.”

“What about a man and another man?”

“Nope.”

“A man and two girls?”

“ _No!!!”  
_

“What class can a baby get when it’s born?”

“Can’t a girl just use her mana to make a baby?”

“Are babies born with Noble Phantasms?”

Several questions later, the door to Jeanne […]’s room turned on its hinges to reveal the short-lived smile of an oblivious Parvati, which lasted only as far as it took her to notice the humanoid shape crawling towards her with motions that “unnatural” failed to describe. It was only when it stopped to cling on her ankle that she recognized the borderline sobbing mess that was Ereshkigal in all of her defeated glory, and the two little girls clinging to her back like pouty parasytes.

“Wwwhat exactly is–”

“Auntie Parvie, mom doesn’t wanna tell us how babies are made for realsies! She said that it’s like magic, but then she said it’s not!”

“Auntie Eresh told us a lie, so we are going to set her pants on fire like Nursery Rhyme taught us.”

The first blink was like the clash of jaws biting on a morsel with the oddest flavor. The second one gave way to a glint of understanding, overlapping with the reflection of a face that all but spelled _‘Please, save me and my jeans! I don’t want either of them to turn into cinders!_ ’ A face a bit like…

…this. The third was a curtain call, thin flesh veiling eyes that had seen all they needed to, motioning down like an echo of her entire body, which knelt down to bestow a kind stroke not upon any of the two youngest heads present, as rather, in a most paradoxical turn of events, the oldest one. Reassurance pored from this _auntie_ , this _sister_ , like a rejuvenating spell, which nonetheless paled in comparison to the magical warmth exuding from her smiling lips, which parted to bestow the blessings of a wisdom unattainable but by herself.

“Oh, but babies _are_ born from a very special kind of magic, which only two people with a veeery important bond can use. That magic - the strongest magic of all… is _**love**_.”

A twin pair of finally assuaged and easily distracted _oooh’s_ caressed Ereshkigal’s ears and almost tempted her to join in. Yes, that was indeed an answer befitting of the woman, no, the _goddess_ whom she’d deemed her sworn sibling! The one who could so easily lead a fellow deity and two children to bask in the glow of her immeasurable Motherly Aura! Among the Top Ten Supporters in the Lancer Class, the Goddess of Love Parvati…!

“Tee~hee!” _*Wink*!_


	3. Rated E for Extremely Inappropriate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Introducing Medb in your story should warrant an immediate bump to its Rating.

It was one of those nights, see. One of _those_ kinds of night. You know. The ones where you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place - between drowning in boredom or a kilometric ton of alcohol, in our case - so of course you decide to get wasted and stick something rock hard in your place. _You know_. So there you are, lounging on a sofa on a Sunday night while you sip some prime quality wine off a Celtic oaf’s pecs. I’m talking the good stuff here, none of that watered down Dom Babylon trash. The stuff of gods. Literally. We just plowed Skadi’s cabinet empty and never looked back. Couldn’t have even had we wanted to, what with us being wasted, and I mean, utterly. You look up ‘mess’ in the dictionary, you’ll find a double spread of us totaling our last braincells with some alcohol-powered steamy action., Rated E for Even I can’t find the words to describe the primal wildness that went on in that room. I think. Honestly, everything past the fifth or eighth bottle is a blur. Next thing I know, I’m awake and discover it’s still Sunday. Took me a couple minutes to realize it was Sunday _morning_. Yeah. One week. One whole week-wide blank. Like, damn me, that might have been a teensy-weensy bit too much? ‘Course, I said what- _ever_ to that and started prepping for round two of this sleazy bonanza… that’s when I notice it. Took me a while to put two and two together, but there’s not mistaking it: culprit’s a geas. Pretty messed up one at that. Dunno who came up with the idea - I’m placing my bets on ‘Gus personally, beefboy gets some _weird_ ideas for his bedroom games - but it’s a bonafide, one-hundred-percent binding geas, ‘cept I guess we got so drunken off our minds we somehow polluted all the ritualy stuff. So yeah, long story short, I got one heckie of a language filter going on, and no idea how to get rid of it yet. My lips are sealed, so to speak. I tried them all, but the result’s the same. It gets all twisted in my mouth, and not the way I like it, if you know what I mean. Like, I don’t know: weenie-meanie. See! I tried to say noodly-poodly, but no, it comes out like that. Same deal for cakey-pie. Huh, that almost sounded dirtier than the actual thing. Oh, coochie totally gets a pass though. I donno. Maybe it just works on words that _don’t_ kill a biggie-wiggie. Believe me, if it sounds annoying to you, it’s even worse for me. I’m losing my mind here, Eresh.

“O…kay. That still doesn’t explain why we’re, uhm… _here,_ Medb.”

This is where the Queen of Connacht blinked. It was the kind of blink hard-coded in the DNA of humans and their supernatural ilk ever since childhood (or summonhood, in the latter’s case). Innocence spoken in the language of batting eyelashes. The oblivious admittance of a person who couldn’t fathom what exactly was so weird about two adult women standing in an establishment oft referred to as an ‘adult store’.

“Why, to do what everybody else comes here to do: shopping!“

A straightforward answer, if not a sensible one. Mostly because people and rulers of the Underworld like Ereshkigal do not usually shop - or go at all, for that matter - to sex shops.

“But did I have to come too?!” See? That’s not the pouty face nor the awkward yelling of a woman who feels the need to spice up her bedtime. Look at Medb now. The confidence with which she rests her hands on hips thrust out like lethal spears of legend. The condescending look interlaced with a veneer of patience. Like a parent who can’t _believe_ she has to explain to her teen daughter how babies are made.

“Yes. Yes you do. I have a reputation here, you know? A reputation I’d like to uphold. That’s not going to happen, if I walk in holding one of these and ask if ‘pwetty pwease, could they wrap this woobie wobbly toy for me~?’”

The ‘woobie wobbly toy’ in question being waved in front of Ereshkigal’s flabbergasted face was the **Goetia Series Barbatos XXL ~ForthComing Pleasure Edition~** , which had been enjoying great popularity among frustrated housewives and lonely Avengers ever since its release during last Christmas. The lumpy girth which had won it the affection of many cavities could be attested by the fact that it still wouldn’t have fit through the innocent lips of its witness, despite the Mesopotamian goddess’ mouth having been spread wider open by sheer disbelief and embarrassment than physics should have allowed it to.

“Anyway, I’ve got a shopping list this long to go through and a credit card limit to top off. So be a good mouthpiece and pretend you’re the one filling that basket, alrighty?”

“Not alright, nope, absolutely no–”

It was around the third arc drawn in empty air by Ereshkigal’s wildly flailing arms that disaster approached, clad in the trappings of a kindly smiling clerk. Who might not have been too compliant with the reality of an actual adult store, but let’s face it: realism had gone out the window the moment this had involved two metaphysical manifestations of mythological figures, at least one of whom was direly in need of making some new additions to her dildo collection. Thus, the clerk was left free by narrative convenience to approach the troubled goddess and spell our doom with such a simple sentence as

“May I help you with something, dear customer?”

Words which fell like a grip on Ereshkigal’s shoulders. No, those were actually Medb’s fingers, and _that_ was her smile - curved and sharp like a blade folded a thousand times by an able and kink-heavy artisan. A guillotine strapped to its executor’s face, not at all like the condemned being turned around to face her doom in a rubbery, lotioned future.

“Oh, you definitely can help my _needy_ friend here. Isn’t that right? E~resh?”

It was one of those days, see.


End file.
